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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29446506">The Burning of Flowers</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea'>nostalgicatsea</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel 616</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Anger, Angst, Avengers Vol. 5 (2013), Betrayal, Denial of Feelings, Emotional Hurt, Hanahaki Disease, Heartbreak, Internal Conflict, Loss of Trust, Love/Hate, M/M, Obsession, hickmanvengers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 18:13:54</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,257</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29446506</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgicatsea/pseuds/nostalgicatsea</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>If flowers bloomed, there was only one truth. If none did, there were two: both of you were in love or both of you weren’t.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Steve Rogers/Tony Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>You Gave Me A Stocking 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Burning of Flowers</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicasen/gifts">magicasen</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy Valentine's Day, magic! I thought it would be interesting to do a Hanahaki AU from the perspective of someone who doesn't have it and wants the person they love to get it because I don't think I've seen that before. Hickmanvengers came to mind, so here's my first 616 fic since the first fic I ever posted on AO3 seven years ago.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fire ran through Steve untempered, frothing, volcanic blood incinerating everything in its path: his veins, his muscles, everything he had felt for Tony. All had burned away and the little that remained had liquefied, melted into his rage, so that he was no longer himself, only that beastly anger. </p><p>Nothing could grow in him, not even death flowers. </p><p>He had been afraid of that, hadn’t he, with his dreams of Tony looming over him, the secret, gnawing worry that he was falling short. One day, he wouldn’t be enough for Tony, wouldn’t be able to catch up to him. But it was good that he had stumbled and Tony had outpaced him, too far down the path to reach. He didn’t want to follow Tony, not down this road, not when Tony’s idea of a future was one secured by the genocide of entire worlds. </p><p>Better the death of his heart than the death of his soul, his own death over the deaths of others. But he hadn’t had to choose in the end. Anger always won out for him, and it had cremated his love for Tony. Anger was what he turned to when he had nothing, and it was all he was. </p><p>Tony had showed him that. Tony always stripped him down to the basics. </p><p>It was humiliating. </p><p>Tony used to say sorry or try to explain himself in the face of Steve’s ire because he wanted Steve by his side through everything. Loved him through everything. Steve knew that. Had proof of it even if they had never spoken about it. Steve’s lungs had stayed spotless through all their disagreements, through the fight over the SHRA, as healthy as they had been ever since he got the serum, and he had cursed himself for it, despaired over it, and then been thankful for it, that his love for Tony had never left him. If there were no flowers, Tony wasn’t out of reach. There was hope for them yet, however much it dwindled day by day as they remained divided, until he had forgotten what the absence of flowers meant because absence was so easy to overlook.</p><p>Steve liked to believe that he would have stopped himself from dealing the finishing blow. That he wouldn’t kill unless it was necessary, that he wouldn’t kill someone who used to be his friend even if he had turned foe. But the ugly, shameful, and frightening truth was that that belief, though it had been reset and healed, was now more fragile. Broken once, it was more susceptible to breaking again. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he would have held himself back had he not remembered in time that he loved Tony and had never stopped even at the peak of their fight. Nowadays, it was hard to remember what wanting to hold back felt like. </p><p>But Tony wasn’t asking for forgiveness this time, refusing to give either apology or justification. He knew that he had passed the point of no return, not just in what he and the others were doing but also in what Steve would forgive. Arrogance. Self-importance. Cruelty and cowardice parading as martyrdom. No one else could do this. No one else could be allowed. There were no choices. He wouldn’t apologize because of that, Steve thought with a sneer.</p><p>Or he wouldn’t because of his understanding of its futility. His acceptance that it wouldn’t matter what excuses he gave, how much he pleaded his case, because Steve didn’t care to listen. Because Steve didn’t care about him anymore, other than to hate every atom of him.</p><p>It made Steve think, these days, of the state of Tony’s lungs. His ravaged failure of a heart. How the hatred that had burst alive in him was hot enough to awaken dormant seeds in Tony even from a distance. He imagined roots burrowing into muscle. Ropy stems spreading parasitically, wrapping Tony’s lungs and squeezing Tony’s heart, creeping up Tony’s throat. Leaves and buds unfurling in the flower bed of Tony’s chest, the crimes, the guilt, the black decay of his thoughts the highest quality of fertilizer.   </p><p>It could be enough to stop Tony, in a twisted way. He could be enough to stop Tony. Tony’s love for him could kill him before he went too far. Bring him to his knees and make him gag up flora, clog his respiratory tract and suffocate him, flowers avalanching until he was buried alive under a love that he had cultivated to murder himself.</p><p>But there were no signs of thorns or leaves or petals. No sweet sickness perfuming Tony. No bloodstains on his mouth, faded like lipstick he hadn’t managed to wipe off entirely, or careful, labored breathing that made him hunch over and carry himself gingerly.  </p><p>Maybe it hadn’t had time to set in—or maybe it wouldn’t, the illness stillborn after Steve had slammed his fist against Tony’s cheek and felt the bone there yield under his knuckles.</p><p>But Tony was an expert in many things including hiding pain. He would hide it well if it had had a chance to take root, and that was what Steve couldn’t stop thinking about, the answer that eluded him.</p><p><em>Let him hurt</em>, he thought savagely. <em>Let him be punished for his sins. </em></p><p>Because Tony shouldn’t get away with what he did, he told himself, but pretense didn’t come naturally to him the way it did Tony. He knew, however small-minded and obsessive and pathetic it made him, that it was because Tony shouldn’t be allowed not to care about this when he cared too much.</p><p>He needed to see for himself physical, tangible proof that Tony loved him because Tony had betrayed him. Had hurt him and had loved him back and hadn’t intervened as he had been violated. </p><p>To Tony, he had been something that needed to be crushed under the tires of what was necessary on the way to his better, safer future, a loss that was regrettable but unavoidable. </p><p>Dispensable.</p><p>That’s what he was to Tony when he couldn’t make Tony mean nothing to him even if he tried.  </p><p>A violation for a violation then, that’s what he wanted. It was only right. It was only fair, when he had been reduced to this, was bleeding like this. </p><p>He had spent so much time imagining Tony’s wounds that the intimate familiarity made them his own. The stab of thorns and spiked leaves as sharp as the betrayal that slid between his ribs. The blood coating Tony’s tongue as unpleasant as the bile coating his when his memories had returned. The draw of every breath as painful for Tony as it was for him, Tony’s throat as abraded by growths as his was by yelling. </p><p>If there was no escape for him, there would be no escape for Tony too. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart. </p><p>He was Tony’s, which meant—which had to mean—that Tony was his. His happiness was Tony’s happiness. His pain was Tony’s pain. His love was Tony’s. His body, Tony’s. </p><p>If he couldn’t extract Tony from himself, he would sow himself in Tony, growing and killing and eventually consuming him whole. What he had for Tony would bloom like tumors in him, a constant reminder that never let him forget what he had done to Steve. </p><p>That never let him forget Steve so that Tony would be thinking of him and only him to his death, to Steve’s death, to their world’s as he would Tony. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>“We are surrounded by total chaos—I mean, an all-encompassing disaster of biblical proportions...and all I can think of is him.” - Steve Rogers, <i>Avengers Vol. 5 #43</i></p></blockquote><div class="children module" id="children">
  <b class="heading">Works inspired by this one:</b>
  <ul>
    <li>
        <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29673855">[Podfic] The Burning of Flowers</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cathalinaheart/pseuds/Cathalinareads">Cathalinareads (Cathalinaheart)</a>
    </li>
  </ul>
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